The Top 5 Frustrations of Project Managers and Tips on How to Avoid Them: Part 2 of 5

Emily Down | October 28, 2011

2. FRUSTRATION: Decision rehashing.

Hosting endless meetings where half the time is wasted revisiting old decisions or bringing others up to speed.

We’ll admit this one drives us crazy. We dislike meetings. But, we especially dislike meetings that are monopolized by rehashing decisions already made. “Why did we decide to change the functionality of that feature?” “When did we approve that?” “Bruce was out last week, can we revisit the plan so he’s up to speed?” Painful, inefficient, frustrating.

TIP: Be clear.

Provide full context of the decisions being made so everyone understands the scope of the project and why. People need clarity and understanding to execute at their best.

This applies upstream to your stakeholders and customers so they understand what they’re getting and it applies downstream to your design, development and QA teams so they know exactly what to build and to test properly. As a solution, new collaborative tools exist that will help you capture the healthy debates and ongoing discussions that naturally take place around requirements, and they don’t require hosting more meetings. People can add their feedback anytime and see what others are saying to agree or disagree, approve or reject, or propose edits to refine the solution.

Also, the decisions that occur in meetings aren’t easily tracked in documents and people’s memories fade as time goes on. How many times have you left a meeting feeling great, thinking everyone is on the same page, only to find yourself debating what the team decided a few weeks later?

If this is an issue for your organization, adopt a new technique to capture decisions in line with requirements, and make them easy for the team to view anytime. This will eliminate ambiguity and ensure that decisions about the project are crystal clear.